Abstract
This chapter on Fatih Akın’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul expands the discussion of taşra in a transnational direction. It reveals the structural affinities between Turkey’s internal relation to its provinces and Europe’s relationship to Turkey itself. Against the dominant, celebratory interpretations, the chapter demonstrates how, through its narrative strategies, the documentary latently reproduces Orientalizing assumptions and ends up undermining an understanding of hybridity that it purportedly promotes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the attempts of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to resignify the bridge in Istanbul, which has long served as a metaphor for Turkish identity nationally and globally, and contemplates what these attempts reveal about the psychic dimensions of the current forms of Turkish nationalism.
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Notes
- 1.
See Bargu (2018) for a detailed account of the events of the night as well as the various ways in which this coup attempt differed from the previous ones.
- 2.
Sala is a special call to prayer usually delivered to commemorate the death of a Sunni-Muslim community member. See Küçük and Türkmen (2018) for the unifying, Sunni-nationalist signification of the salas on the coup-resisting groups as well as their disaffecting and portentous tenor for Alevis and Kurds, who have historically bore the brunt of Sunni-nationalist violence.
- 3.
According to Süleyman Soylu, the Minister of Interior, in the five years since the coup attempt 282,790 people were taken into custody and 94,975 were arrested. In total 597,783 people were “processed” (https://www.cnnturk.com/turkiye/son-dakika-haberi-suleyman-soylu-feto-ile-mucadele-rakamlarini-acikladi). According to turkeypurge.com, a site run by anonymous journalists who have been trying to keep track of all the purges, as of March 2019, 6021 academics had lost their jobs, as had 4463 judges and prosecutors, 189 media outlets had been shut down, and 319 journalists arrested.
- 4.
For a collection of insightful essays on the content of this re-engineering project and its effects on different spheres from law to architecture, media to education, Islamism to Kurdish resistance, economics to political governance, see Küçük and Özselçuk, C. (2019), special issue on “Decline of the Republic: Vicissitudes of the Emerging Regime in Turkey,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 118: 1.
- 5.
This new class was made up of businesspeople who were excluded from the previous networks of capital fostered by the then dominant Kemalist-secularist establishment.
- 6.
Particularly as AKP’s growth policies became increasingly more extractionist in 2010s in the way they legalized and facilitated annexation and commercialization of natural lands and resources (forests, coasts, valleys, lakes, rivers, and mountains) as well as built public spaces (such as city parks and squares), the government mobilized the same populist discourse of modernization and civilization to frame environmental activists and critical civil organizations such as occupational associations of architects, engineers, lawyers, archeologists, doctors, etc. as internal enemies of national interests. As such, the government claimed, they were collaborating with external imperial enemies (particularly Europe, the US, and Israel) against growth, prosperity, and stability in Turkey.
- 7.
This is especially the case for those who, in the last few years, split off from Erdoğan’s party AKP to form new political parties, such as former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s “Gelecek Partisi” (The Future Party) and former minister of foreign affairs, former chief negotiator for EU accession and former economy minister Ali Babacan’s “DEVA Partisi” (Democracy and Progress Party). One of the dominant narratives that these figures rely on as they explain to potential voters the reasons behind their dissent to Erdoğan involves the latter’s increasing digression from the foundational principles of AKP, such as the rule of law, pluralist democracy, transparency and accountability, commitment to human rights and freedoms, etc. In these narratives, the period between AKP’s coming to power in 2002 and the early 2010s is represented as the golden age of the party—a period that these new parties claim can be recovered through their reform agendas—where global respect for the country was at its highest and standards in every area (economics, democracy, culture, etc.) had increased.
- 8.
Such a perception materialized particularly after Akın won the Golden Bear in Berlin with Gegen die Wand—the first German film in 18 years to win the prestigious prize. Yet, in the preceding years there had already emerged a critical interest in “Young Turkish Cinema” in Germany, represented by directors such as Fatih Akın, Yüksel Yavuz, Ayşe Polat, Thomas Arslan among others. As Berghahn (2009) indicates, these filmmakers were regarded as “the next wave of auteurs whose films are anticipated to win the international acclaim that was hitherto reserved for the auteurs of New German Cinema in the 1970s and early 80s” (6).
- 9.
This is a term originally used by the film critic Cameron Bailey to refer to those films which are “social issue in content, documentary-realist in style, firmly responsible in intention” and which “position [their] subjects in direct relation to social crisis and attempt to articulate ‘problems’ and ‘solutions to problems’ within a framework of center and margin, white and non-white communities” (Bailey qtd. in Malik 1996: 204). In the particular context of European cinema, “cinema of duty” corresponds to a subgenre in the 1970s and 1980s which concerned itself with exposing the plight of the immigrant/ethnic other. While aiming to raise political consciousness, these films usually reproduced cultural stereotypes, maintained binary oppositions and constructed marginal subjectivity mainly as one of victimhood. In Germany, the examples of “cinema of duty” include works by German filmmakers—such as Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf/Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Sander-Brahms’ Shirins Hochzeit/Shirin’s Wedding (1976), Bohm’s Yasemin (1988)—as well as works by German-Turkish directors, such as Başer’s 40 m2 Deutschland/Forty Square Meters of Germany (1986) and Abschied vom falschen / Farewell to a False Paradise (1989) (Berghahn 2009; Burns 2007).
- 10.
Such an optimistic view of Europe has been severely tarnished, particularly in the last couple of years, with the broad-based support that anti-immigrant and anti-refugee governments have received all over the continent. EU’s exclusionary immigration and asylum policies, while on the one hand exacerbating the “refugee crisis,” on the other hand led to the heterogenization and proliferation of borders. That is to say, the nation-state’s inability to govern and control, through law and politics, the increasingly unpredictable movements of people prompted the displacement and dispersal of the locus of control from the borders of the state territory to centers in transit countries, such as Turkey, and intensified ghettoization in cities where “internal” borders have emerged between bourgeois cities and camps, inner cities or shanty towns. Taking into consideration all these shifts and dispersals of power and control, many scholars in critical border studies now argue that it’s more apt to speak of a “crisis of sovereignty” than a migrant or “refugee crisis” (Walters 2006; De Geneva 2017; Brown 2010; Mezzadro and Neilson 2013).
- 11.
While I take Kosta to be making a formal argument here about the bridge metaphor in general, she seems to conflate the experience of immigrants from Turkey in Germany with the experience of people living in Turkey as their homeland. Her argument about how Crossing the Bridge challenges the conceptualizations of living in-between as a debilitating condition, then, is based on the sweeping and rather untenable assumption that these latter have also been constructed as “living between two worlds” and “devoid of political power” (347) since the documentary is about the music produced by people who live and work in Turkey and identify it as their homeland.
- 12.
For a perceptive analysis of Buena Vista Social Club which connects the documentary’s colonial and Eurocentric inclinations to the political economy of the genre of “world music,” see Oberacker (2008).
- 13.
See Yeğenoğlu’s Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (1998), especially the second chapter, “Veiled Fantasies: Cultural and Sexual Difference in the Discourse of Orientalism.” There, she demonstrates how the Orientalist will to know what is behind the veil is intricately linked to the voyeuristic pleasures of the male gaze and saturated with the sexual desire to penetrate.
- 14.
The participants in this sequence make rather sweeping and untenable claims about “the American rap scene” and fail to see that what they refer to as “gangsta” is neither a uniform nor a homogeneous style. To its detriment, the documentary itself also corroborates such flattening of difference in the way it rounds off this sequence with a blunt stereotypical image of a “gangsta” rapper.
- 15.
The documentary includes a brief interview with Erkin Koray, one of the pioneers of psychedelic folk/rock in Turkey since the early 1960s, whose experimentations with traditional Turkish instruments and Anatolian folk songs have influenced contemporary rock bands in Turkey, including some that are featured in Crossing the Bridge. Koray’s inclusion in the documentary does indicate some awareness of the long history of rock in Turkey. However, the content of the interview is rather dismissive of this history and its multiple actors in the way it depicts Koray as a solitary figure who managed to survive in a hostile cultural environment that singled him out as “excessive” and eccentric and consistently tried to hamper his career. While a lot of avant-garde artists were subjected to different forms of marginalization at the time, there also existed a counterculture niche that sustained and supported these artists.
- 16.
See Grosrichard (1998) for the elaboration of this psychoanalytically-informed understanding of the workings of Orientalism. Grosrichard’s sophisticated study is particularly important for the way it fills a curious gap in Said’s Orientalism, that is, the absence of an engagement with Orientalist literature on the Ottoman Empire.
- 17.
This information is not provided in the documentary. Indeed, neither Hacke nor any other participant introduces MacCrimmon. The audience is expected to deduce from her short interview who she is and what she does or else conduct a little research of their own to figure out this information.
- 18.
To avoid belaboring this point any further, I have refrained from including an analysis of the sequence with Mira Hunter—a Sufi whirler who performs in the documentary with Mercan Dede, a Turkish DJ and composer who fuses ambient electronic sounds with traditional mystic/Sufi music. As with Brenna MacCrimmon in this case, too, the audience is not provided with any information about Hunter or how, as a North American woman, she came to practice whirling.
- 19.
Until recently Sulukule, a district in the historic old city of Istanbul, was home to one of the oldest Roma communities in Turkey. Under the sweeping wave of urban renewal projects which has ravaged the city since mid-2000s, the Roma were forced out of the historic settlement and relocated to housing projects built miles away, in the outskirts of Istanbul. At the time of the filming of the documentary, the gentrification project was at its very initial stages and the Roma had not yet been dislocated.
- 20.
Senar, in an ornate stage costume and with full make-up, is filmed in a room adorned with a red carpet, dark velvet curtains, and old-fashioned wallpapers. The orchestra behind her is made up of elderly men (Senar, who died in 2015, was 86 years old during the filming). The overall effect of the setting is an uncanny one generated by the sense that a long-gone era has been brought back to life for purposes of display. Senar also evokes the temporality of a mythical past as she starts her interview by saying: “Once upon a time there was a Müzeyyen Senar. That’s me.” Aksu, dressed in a much more conservative outfit than her usual stage costumes, is also filmed in a similar room with the silhouette of the city only vaguely discernable from the windows behind. The lighting in the room, accentuating tones of yellow and light brown, creates the nostalgic sepia effect. Her singing is intercut with black-and-white images of the city from the past, which fortifies the temporal dislocation.
- 21.
Hacke explains the choice of setting for Doğan’s performance by referring to the “incredible acoustics” of the space. However, this reasoning is not very satisfactory given that acoustics had not been a priority before and that he had recorded other musicians in less than favorable aural circumstances.
- 22.
It is interesting that most of the photographs of Istanbul used in this section are the same ones by Ara Güler that Pamuk includes in his memoir. However, as I argued against the criticisms that read Pamuk’s memoir as an example of Orientalist literature, while Pamuk provides detailed historical accounts for the hüzün that the city embodies in his experience, Akın’s documentary includes no such attempt at historicizing.
- 23.
Following Bora, I use the term “official Kemalist nationalism” to refer to “Atatürk milliyetçiliği” (Atatürk nationalism), which has a “strong modernist-Westernizing vein,” to differentiate it from “ulusçuluk”/ “ulusalcılık,” which Bora translates as “left-wing Kemalist nationalism” (2003: 438–439). This latter has become influential since the 1990s as a secularist response to the rise of Islamism. While “ulusalcılık” appropriates the left-wing discourses of Kemalist nationalism from the 1960s and 1970s, it is defined by an anti-Westernism that postures as anti-imperialism. For an insightful discussion of different types of nationalism in Turkey and their relationship to the official one see Bora (2003).
- 24.
The internal reproduction of the East/West binary was inescapable within the Eurocentric conceptualization of modernity among the Kemalist elites where modernization was “equated with” Westernization (Gülalp 2003: 388). As Sayyid explains, “to modernize, the Kemalists had to Westernize, but the very nature of Westernization implied the necessity of Orientalization since you can only Westernize what is not Western […] One had to represent the oriental before one could postulate westernization as an antidote” (1997: 68).
- 25.
As Özbek emphasizes, while arabesk retained its hybrid form over the years, its “content, production, reception patterns and social significance have changed markedly since the 1960s.” This transformation, she continues, can be traced along the transformation of capitalism in Turkey—“from […] nationalist developmentalism to […] transnational market orientation after 1980s” (1997: 212).
- 26.
Arabesk has been embraced by conservative populist political movements of the post-1980s era and by influential political figures in this period. However, its depreciatory perception still endures among Kemalist-secularist urban classes. For an extensive overview of the history of the genre and shifts in its reception see Özbek (1997); Stokes (1992, 2010).
- 27.
There is, of course, a lot of variation within arabesk in terms of techniques, sounds, themes, etc. and not all performers/composers define and practice the genre in the particular way that Gencebay does.
- 28.
I find it important to note here that a contestatory hybridity does not necessarily always translate into progressive political practice. Gencebay’s disruption of dominant modernization discourses or his radical musical interventions have never materialized in his involvement in progressive politics. On the contrary, Gencebay’s political commitments have always lied with the status quo and with those of the conservative political parties.
- 29.
Urban renewal projects also commenced in the aftermath of the military lockdowns in the southeastern towns and cities. Large sections in these towns were expropriated by the state and residents were either forced to migrate or sell their demolished properties to the state way below the market price. In this sense, these renewal projects must be seen as part of the ruling regime’s intentional demographic restructuring of the area as well as a manifestation of its desire to eradicate, in the name of erecting a homogenous Sunni-Turkish community, the last remaining sliver of plurality in these multi-ethnic neighborhoods and expunge the collective memories that they embody in their built environment. See Özar (2017a, b) for a detailed account of one of these instances, the destruction and reconstruction in Suriçi, which was considered the historical “heart” of the city of Amed (Diyarbakır). Commenting on the construction projects in Sur, the then prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu stated that they will make “Sur like Toledo where everyone will want to visit because of its architectural texture” and that they will build housing for people “to live in dignity” (https://haber.sol.org.tr/turkiye/davutoglu-suru-oyle-insa-edecegiz-ki-toledo-gibi-olacak-144452). He thus framed the construction project within a colonial logic of development and morality where the current residents of the town were implicitly marked as transgressors, as people and communities who violate the norms of decent, dignified living.
- 30.
In the town of Cizre more than 10,000 homes were destroyed and 176 people were burned by the security forces in three basements where they sought refuge from the heavy shelling and from the fighting between partially-armed Kurdish urban youth groups and Turkish security forces. In addition to the people murdered in the “basement massacre,” as it is referred by Cizre residents, 85 people also died during the military operations and round-the-clock military lockdowns between December 2015 and March 2016. See Stevenson (2016). Ferguson (2016) provides an explanation of what a round-the-clock military lockdown involves and how it is different from a “curfew.”
- 31.
In Turkish “Boğaziçi” literally means “inside of straits,” thus referring “objectively” to a geographical formation.
- 32.
The demolition of AKM is part of AKP’s larger project of remaking the public space of Taksim Square, which has significance not only for Kemalists, but also for a wide range of oppositional political groups, including various branches of feminist, LGBTQ, environmentalist, anti-capitalist, and labor movements.
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Özselçuk, E. (2022). Fatih Akın’s Crossing the Bridge: Turkey as Europe’s Taşra, or Limitations of a Metaphor. In: The Provincial and The Postcolonial in Cultural Texts from Late Modern Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04666-7_4
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